Good morning, both for everybody in the room and also the people online. I'm just gonna do a short introduction, and Scott and the team are gonna do all the hard work, which is what chairmen do. They just hand over to the management team. Just a few words. We decided as a board, probably three and a bit years ago, that there was an opportunity to create a new business that would have a similar market cap to the whole group at the time. Hence, we went down this path of selling off packaging and filters. You'll see in the presentation, there were a few other divestments as well. I think that's worked pretty well, that we have ended up with a business that we can invest in.
There was always a fight for funds, particularly between packaging and components, manufacturing, equipment, systems, you know, enterprise systems, which you'll hear about in Scott's presentation. It means we can focus all our financial resource on one business, and I think you'll find from the presentation, it's an exciting business with great potential, both organic and bolt-on acquisitions, which we have the firepower to execute. Why are we doing all this? It's quite simple. We want to do it to improve shareholder value, both in terms of what the value of this business is over the next few years, and to be giving a special dividend back, which we'll be identifying when we do that fairly shortly. Just a quick one on the board to make sure that we've got the right balance.
I've been with the business, coming up seven years. Scott, the new CEO and components man through and through. Jack, we brought in as... Can I call you mature CFO? In other words, he's been around the block a few times and has the right background both in manufacturing and PLC. Mary is independent, senior independent director, but also audit and risk chair. A great experience from her days from Deloitte. Sits on the board of a number of FTSE 250 businesses. Adrian's based in the States. He's an exec. He runs a fairly large manufacturing and some component type businesses, so he really knows what this is all about, and responsible for businesses in Europe and the USA. He fits our profile, and we searched high and low to find somebody like Adrian. Ralph.
Ralph spent 10 years in Asia, so he knows the Asia market. He currently spends 50% of his time in Germany, which is a very important market for us, and Europe, and also back in Asia. He's got that balance between the two. Dupsy, she currently has a strategy director of strategy in a large company, and we thought bringing her on solves a few problems. One, she's very digital. If you look at the board, I think not everyone on the board is digital, although we try hard to get there. She brings a fresh look at the way we go about our business and certainly when you hear what Scott's trying to do in terms of having a very digital front end of his business.
Emma was the company secretary in the group before and has moved into components. We think that's a pretty good team. We're gonna start off with a short video, then Scott and the team are gonna present the new Essentra.
Okay. Well, thank you, Paul, and thank you to everybody for coming along today. I'm Scott Fawcett, CEO Designate for the new Essentra. I've been with the business for almost 12 years now, and excited to be able to share with you today the story of those 12 years in many ways, and our plans to accelerate that as we go into the future. In summary, what we're gonna tell you today are 3 key points. Firstly, about the unique business model that we're operating. We are both a manufacturer and a distributor, and we talk about the manufacturing strengths of having expertise and flexibility, and we talk about the distribution strengths of having a broad range and high levels of service and being very customer-centric.
We're bringing those together, which is creating value both for our customers and for Essentra as well. We operate in this highly fragmented market, and we'll talk later about the opportunity that gives us for growing both organically and inorganically. Our customer proposition is service-led. We call this hassle-free internally. We want to be easy to do business with, and that's because of the nature of the products we sell. We're selling relatively low-cost components to manufacturing customers. It's critically in our customer's mind that the components arrive on time. That, in many ways, is more important than the actual cost of those components, as the cost of disruption can be very high.
We're innovating that proposition as we go forward through digitalization, both digitalization on the front end of the business, but also the supporting back end in the processes by which we run the organization, and we see sustainability as a great source of advantage moving forward. We're working on programs to make our operations more sustainable and the products we manufacture more sustainable, and that's leading to both organic and inorganic growth opportunities. Finally, we'll talk about the resilience of the business and the opportunity we have to expand margins, and in many ways, that margin expansion and cash generation is part of the way we'll fund that inorganic growth story. Let me talk about the new ExCo. We spent most of this year bringing the team together.
Delighted to present them to you today. Most of us are here in the room. We have the new, mature CFO, Jack Clarke, who's gonna last for a long time. Great that Jack Clarke's joined us with his experience of running finance functions in other FTSE 250s. Joanna Speed's supporting us also from the legacy Essentra team through the transition, helping us build the existing team or the new team and get that team in place. Paul's mentioned Emma's moved across to be company secretary for the new organization as well. Delighted that Rob, Sam, and Hugues have stepped up from the divisional team with me to form part of the new ExCo, and we've recently recruited Lynne Vandeveer, who will speak later also, as our CMO and running the Americas business.
Lynne brings a breadth of experience from both consumer and B2B marketing roles of the past. We have got one vacancy today, so we'll likely update at the full year results, but we're recruiting somebody to run the Asia region for us as we speak. Let me tell you a little bit about the model and the way the business is operating. First, we've been on a journey to simplify Essentra. Paul mentioned the divestments over the last five or six years. This has been driven from having strategic clarity and understanding that these businesses didn't really have much common ground, and that's driven us to the point of having much simpler organization going forward of a pure play components business.
I'd like to thank Paul Forman, the predecessor and current CEO for Essentra, for his part in giving us that clarity and driving us to this point in the journey and enabling us to stand forward as a pure play components business. Today, we're a leading global, I say, manufacturer and a distributor of essential industrial components. What we want to be in the future is the world's leading responsible hassle-free supplier of essential industrial components. What do we mean by world-leading? Well, we want world-leading employee engagement. We think that's critical to enable us to drive the business forward. That will feed into world-leading customer satisfaction, and we typically measure that via our net promoter score. We want to be world-leading in terms of our sustainability efforts.
We want to be shaping and driving the market about being a more sustainable business, and ultimately, this all together will lead to world-leading financial results. With that, our ambition is to double the revenue of the organization and to triple the operating profit as we go forward. Now, that's a lofty ambition, but based upon a good track record and history of growth. During my time with the business, we have more than tripled the revenue of the components business. You can see here, we've gone from less than GBP 100 million up to over GBP 300 million in that period. An organic growth of between 4%-5% CAGR through the period, and our expectations and plans are to be able to accelerate that to over 5% as we go forward.
We've also been involved in 10 acquisitions during this period of time as well. We've brought 10 additional businesses into the components family, predominantly manufacturing businesses who have brought us new products that we can plug into the Essentra Components distribution processes. A good track record of growth over the past decade or so. Just to give the business a little bit of flavor and color, we have 12 manufacturing sites, and Rob will talk later about the geographic footprint and the resilience there. We're making a high volume of these relatively low-cost products, 80 million parts produced per week. The real magic is in the mix. It's a very broad range of products. Anybody can make a high volume of a single unit. That's quite straightforward. Making high volumes of a high-mix complex operating model is where the magic is.
We have 45,000 standard parts. They're parts that we would carry in our websites and have in our distribution centers. Beyond that, there are another 45,000 parts that we sell each year that are manufactured for customers in particular. A very complex business from a mix point of view. The stocking proposition is delivered through 23 distribution centers and supported by an emerging hub strategy which Rob again will refer to later, and that leads to us having about 1 billion parts in stock at any one time. We then take this offer to market through 32 sales and service centers, so it's important that we have this local customer touch reaching out to our circa 80,000 customers.
That's then generated this high level of transactional flow through the business, so 1.08 million order lines per year, 17,000 orders shipped through our distribution centers each week, and all managed by around 3,000 members of the new Essentra team. Quite a complex business from a digital and data point of view. Lots of opportunities for optimization, so continuing to digitalize the business to make data work for us is really important, and we'll talk about how we're doing that both front end and back end as we're going through the presentation today. We talked about those local customer service centers. Here's a map of our geographical footprint. Rob will cover later the manufacturing and warehousing locations.
Just touching on the customer service locations, we are operating in all three regions, from Edmonton over there in the West, in the Canadian oil fields, down to Sydney over here in the East. Northernmost point is probably Helsinki in Finland, down to Johannesburg in South Africa. A very good range covering the majority of the world's industrial production scale effectively. In terms of the shape of the business, we are just over half of the business in Europe today, around a third in the U.S., and growing obviously in Asia, circa 14% right now. Most of our business is sold directly to end users, directly to these manufacturing businesses. However, there is about 23% that goes through distribution.
This can be for a number of reasons, but a common reason is we serve our MRO customers, so anybody wanting to maintain or repair product typically is served through distribution rather than served direct. Our core focus is on the production user. In terms of the revenue by offer type, most of our sales come from these 45,000 standard parts that we publish on the websites and that we hold in stock. However, there's a significant minority coming from configured products or out-and-out customized products. Again, this is really the combination of distribution and manufacturing on showing in this one chart. In terms of manufactured versus sourced goods, around 70% of what we currently sell is manufactured. Rob will talk later about our plans to continue to increase that manufactured bias.
We have a very broad customer base, but our core customer target, and I'll explain why later, is this broad industrial manufacturing sector, where roughly 70% of our customers and 70% of our sales are today. That's really our key focus area. Over the past decade, we've diversified the business quite tremendously. That's diversification in terms of product offering, from the legacy products very much around the protection areas. We've grown a lot into the electronics hardware, plastic fasteners, and cable management products. Probably the standout being access hardware. Since the acquisition of the business in Turkey, which Jack will refer to later, that's been a real driver of growth for us, over the last 7 or 8 years. Diversification of the product offering has been important, and that's enabled diversification of the customer base as well.
The largest sector still is this other industrial manufacturing sector, so customers who are very fragmented in here. This could be anybody from an industrial cleaning manufacturer to a vending machine manufacturer to a trailer manufacturer. Lots and lots of niche manufacturing businesses, but all typically making equipment for other businesses to use. Coming through, obviously some growing markets around automotive is a big market for us, increasingly into electric vehicles, electric vehicle charging, which Eoghan will talk through. Telecoms, automation obviously growing in the trend. Renewable energy's a fledgling market for us, but one that we're focusing on and building some good opportunities in.
Now, while today we're talking about the mid-term and the future opportunities for Essentra, we obviously can't ignore the fact that we're likely to see a more difficult economic period in the short term. Just to touch on that, here is our performance over the last 12-13 years through the cycles of the global financial crisis and COVID. The business is somewhat cyclical. It's becoming less cyclical over time as we diversify. If I take you back to the global financial crisis, around 23% of the business was in the U.K. Right now that's 7%. Conversely, Asia was around 3%, and we've seen Asia's now 14%. We have diversified to give us greater resilience going forward.
Also, what's very interesting, coming out of any downturn, we see these great periods of acceleration. We have a mindset during downturns of managing our cost base, but also keeping an eye on what's happening, and when the market's likely to turn and how we take market share through that market. We have the strength and the resilience to outperform the competition in these down cycles and take share for sure. Even with some elements of cyclicality, the bottom line has remained very resilient. These are the divisional operating margins, so they exclude the central costs, which Jack will, again, refer to later. You can see even during the financial crisis, the operating profit dropped to circa 14% on a divisional basis.
During COVID, we dropped to around 18% on a divisional basis. Still a very strong, resilient business, even in those times of cycle. We have a good understanding of how to manage the business through down cycles, what levers to pull, how to manage the variability of cost to ensure we're protecting profitability, but as I say, always with a mind on the future and the opportunity to take share during these periods of time. I'll talk a little bit now in terms of the proposition and the market environment in which we're operating in. We have estimated the market to be between GBP 8 billion and GBP 10 billion of opportunity. That's based upon the products we sell today. If we broaden that product offer, the market opportunity, the total available market, will also grow. There are thousands of competitors.
Our competitors are typically local. They're typically manufacturing one of the product areas in which we have expertise, and we have 7 areas in which we're experts. They're not spanning across those multiple product areas in the way that we do. There are probably 1 million customers out there who fit into our target audience of manufacturing businesses. A very fragmented market. I should also add on the thousands of competitors, obviously that's also a source for potential acquisition targets as well. Today we have something like a 4% market share, that ranges from up to 6% in Europe down to less than 1% in Asia. Fundamentally, all of our regions have lots of opportunity for growth. The overall market will grow in line with industrial production, through the cycle.
I've touched on this before, but let me reinforce. What's key about this business is the proposition. Our customers are manufacturing businesses, and they're using our products predominantly in their end products, sometimes in the process of manufacturing their product. Our products are small, typically fairly low cost, but they're a critical part of the customer's bill of materials. Without our products, the customer cannot manufacture what they're looking to manufacture. If you ranked that bill of materials from the most expensive to the least expensive items, our products would definitely be in the lower quartile there. Product availability and peace of mind is typically more important than price to our customers.
Hugues will talk later about our ability to manage pricing and pass through inflationary pricing, which we've done successfully over time, even during the last 18 months of higher input cost inflation. We shouldn't abuse the position of pricing that we have. It's important that customers feel as if we're pricing fairly, but the pricing is pretty inelastic, having said that. We do an annual survey every year. We have just launched this in the last week, so this will be, I think our 11th or 12th survey during my time with the organization. We take feedback from our customers in terms of what they're valuing about Essentra, what we're doing well, and what areas we can improve. The things that they're valuing are typically service related aspects of our capability.
Breadth of stock, our responsiveness and quality, fast delivery, ease of ordering. Some of these are coming from our warehousing distribution capabilities, some of these are coming from our manufacturing and flexibility. They're matching in many ways the way we're setting the business up, which is important. Hugues will touch again on digital later, but our customers are telling us the vast majority of them start looking for new products online. These are existing Essentra customers, not even new customers coming to us. Existing customers typically go online to start looking for products. However, because we're selling onto their bill of materials, typically, we get an output, which is some sort of system-generated email that comes to us. We'll never be a high online sales business, but online is critical to us for acquiring and identifying new business opportunities.
Moving forward, we're seeing a great opportunity in terms of sustainability. Both it's the right thing to do, but it gives us a commercial differential. We have the ability to not only report on, but also manage down our customers' Scope 3 data for them, and Lynne will talk more details about this later. Let me talk about I think the magic of how we're trying to bring the business together, and again, how it's uniquely and compelling. I'm gonna touch on the product areas in which we have deep expertise because we have manufacturing history and understanding of these. The first of these is, again, probably the legacy of the business, the oldest part of Essentra. These red caps and plugs, they're bluer in America, just history again.
We manufacture probably 1,000 different varieties of fairly simple caps and plugs that are used by customers to typically protect products, sometimes on the end product as well to fill a hole effectively in a metal cabinet. Caps and plugs is an area that we have a depth of understanding and a very strong history. It's also the area that we're leading in terms of recycled content. This is actually one of the first batch of 40% recycled LDPE products that we produced last year. Lynne will talk more about how we've made progress since that time. Secondly, a second area of expertise around cable management. This is a cable clip, so this fixing fixes onto a panel and you're routing cables.
Virtually every product our customers are manufacturing is some sort of metal enclosure with cables flowing around it. We probably have 2,000 different ways to manage cable around an enclosure or a car or a tractor or a vending machine. There are multitude of opportunities to how you can manage cable, and we have depth of expertise in this. From there, we move to electronics hardware. This is a spacer. It's a PCB spacer, so it's used to space the printed circuit boards that are held in any sort of electronic device, electrical electronic device. Again, we have actually configurable tooling in this area. We can make probably 20,000 varieties of spacer for you, various lengths, various fitting connections on either side, various materials, both metal and plastic, actually.
This is again a huge area where we have a depth of experience around electronic hardware. Moving on to plastic fasteners. Plastic fasteners is another area that we have great experience. Two businesses through history that we've acquired. Jack will talk later about Micro Plastics, which brought us the imperial ranges of plastic fasteners that we obviously sell in the US business as well. This is an area of deep strength as well. Multiple materials and obviously various sizes and shapes of these things. Moving on from there, access hardware. This is a quarter turn lock. This is a simple locking device that will be used on any form of cabinet, access control panels, actually train panels. You'll see these quite often.
We have again a very broad range of these. These were originally we were sourcing these goods from a company called Mesan that Jack will talk to later. It was working very well for us, and we acquired this business at the end of 2014. Also, linked to the acquisition we made in China last year, which gives us more capability in this space as well. Locks, latches, and hinges are sort of an evolution of that offer. Moving on to knobs. Our acquisition of Innovative Components in 2018, 2019, can't remember, brought us a great capability around manufacturing of knobs. This is effectively insert injection molding. Similar technology to we use elsewhere, but again, a broadening out of our capabilities.
Finally, we have a very wide range of security seals. These are slightly different, typically used to secure goods in transit. We manufacture both cable and plastic security seals through our facility in Rayong. What is absolutely unique about this business, nobody else has that breadth of product offering that they can bring to the market. At its broadest, perhaps, there are other competitors of ours who can manage cable management and electronics hardware, but with less breadth than we have, and certainly not on a global scale in the way we do. Nobody else has any of those other products coming together in this single proposition. Nobody else has the potential to be able to meet as many of the customer's needs effectively to cross-sell. Hugues will talk later about the importance of cross-sell to the business.
We flagged earlier in terms of the breadth of our customers. Our key target, as I mentioned, is this industrial manufacturing customer set. The reason why they're our key target is their needs most clearly meet our capabilities. They're manufacturing between 100 and 100,000 units of this vending machine or this industrial cleaner or this EV charging station that Hugues Delcourt will refer to later. They don't want to redesign every single component they're using, and typically our components are not going to differentiate their end product. They're looking for a supplier who can help them identify and source and supply this broad range of products to help them complete their bill of materials. We are best placed to do that.
Uniquely, we're the only people who can bring them that breadth to complete their bill of materials. Typically, there's a lead product. Each of these industries will typically start talking about one area because it's the area that initially comes to mind or the problem they're trying to solve for. Each of these areas actually has the capacity, the potential to buy across the entirety of the range, and that's what's really key. In a very oversimplified way, pretty much everybody has a metal box with wires coming in and out of it and some sort of electronics inside. It's fairly ubiquitous in terms of that opportunity to cross-sell, understanding how the application is working and which products suit their application is the key skill and the expertise that we bring to the party.
Here's a great example. Back in the height of COVID, hopefully people remember the UK Ventilator Challenge. We got involved quite early on with Penlon, who are an existing customer of ours. They started researching a product on the website. They actually called us because they wanted the product on a same-day basis, which again, isn't normal for us. Our research says customers typically want three-day delivery. Penlon wanted same day, so we made that happen, supplied them some product. Actually, our sales guy hand delivered it to them given the situation at the time clearly. From conversation, we then got into a situation where we supplied five products onto the Penlon ventilator across four of our key product categories.
Again, nobody else has the ability to deliver that breadth of products to help the customer in this situation. That's it from me for now. I will hand over to Hugues, who will take us through our organic growth story.
Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. I am Hugues Delcourt, and I have the privilege to lead the sales effort of this fantastic company. In the next 10 minutes or so, I will take you to our winning strategy for organic growth and market share gains. I firmly believe that a good strategy can be explained to a six-year-old, and I think this is what this slide does, if I click correctly. Our strategy is based on three pillars. The first one is get more customers. You could tell me every company needs new customer, and you would be right, but this is particularly fundamental to us because the industries we've been serving for over five decades have gone through massive changes over the last five years, essentially digitalization and electrification.
We are now focusing on emerging players in our growth sector such as electric vehicle and renewable energy, and you'll see an example of that later on. In short, we want to win with the winners. Our second building block, sorry, is grow them by cross-selling, and this one is still fundamental but very unique to us. Why is that? Because we combine, as Scott explained, the expertise of a manufacturer and the breadth of a distributor. If we look at our highly fragmented competition landscape, we either compete against manufacturer with very niche and narrow expertise, or against distributor with larger range than we have, but actually very little expertise in industrial or different industry. In short, we are in a pretty unique position to leverage cross-sell. If we look at our third building block, this is keep them by being hassle-free.
Our ambition is not to keep our customers by being the cheapest, I think Scott made that clear, or granting the longest payment terms. Our ambition is to keep our customer by being hassle-free or easy to deal with, and that's why I'll explain to you how we'll do it later on. We have a clear and simple strategy for organic growth. Let's now go into more detail and concrete examples of each building block. Let's start with acquiring more customers. We have already gone a long way to establish solid foundations. This is based on two mega trends. As Scott alluded to, the vast majority of our customers start their purchasing journey on the web, and an increased number of them do that. We have invested GBP 5 million in the new generation of websites. We have invested in new underpinning digital tools as well.
This has resulted in a doubling of our conversion rates and our organic traffic. The second trend is that the landscape of our customers is massively changing. We are seeing new emerging customers in high-growth area such as electric vehicle, automation, medical, and renewable energy. No later than last week, we won a GBP 1.4 million project for solar farm around the world. The company leading this project was not even in our radar three years ago, which shows you the magnitude of the change. We are winning with the winners. The good news is that we are not stopping here. We continuously invest in new digital tools and improvement of our website. We build functionalities such as AI-based lead scoring, marketing automation programs, CRM-enabled cross-border collaboration, and last but not least, brand campaigns, of which you see an example at the bottom right.
Let's move to our second block, cross-sell. Here again, solid foundations are in place, as it is very well embedded in the DNA of our teams. We have successfully implemented new tools such as optimized CRM solutions to maximize opportunity management, learning management solution to upskill our teams and make sure they stay on top of every industry and product category. Last but not least, AI solutions to deliver prompts via website and CRM platforms. You can see an example of those prompts at the bottom left of a feature of frequently bought item we recently added. Again, we are not stopping here, as we are working on three work stream, digitizing expertise to make sure that our team, again, stay on top on every category. We also launched a global sales effectiveness program.
The main goal of this program is to make sure that we identify best practices globally. We implement them, we monitor them, and we incentivize them. We will also continue to expand our range through organic growth and merger and acquisition. Our target is to increase the number of product categories sold to a customer by 5% year-over-year. Let me now show you a concrete example of what cross-sell can bring to us. You all know what an electric vehicle charger is. The ones among us driving electric car or hybrid cars might have desperately looked for one and contemplated while charging. Well, what you might not know is how many Essentra items do fit in one. No less than four product categories. Cable management, fasteners, PCB hardware, access hardware. No less than 20 different SKUs.
The projections say that the total annual production of EV charger will grow from 4 million in 2022 to 30 million in 2030. I'll let you do the math, but the numbers are mind-blowing. I trust you will look at EV chargers in a different way now, and you will think about us while charging. Let's move to our last building block, which is keeping our customer by being hassle-free. To offer a hassle-free experience, the prerequisite, we are convinced, is to offer an internal hassle-free experience. This is why we are tracking two sets of KPIs. The first one is our employee engagement, which is internal, and the second one is the external one, which is our customer-based Net Promoter Score or NPS.
Our NPS continues to improve month-on-month through 2022, and we have just launched the new addition of our customer survey and our employee survey. We are not stopping here, and we are banking on digitalization to enable further improvements. Our new ERP platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, which has gone live in Spain a year ago and just went live successfully in France two weeks ago, will underpin the customer experience and service. We are adding new features such as global product availability, my account website functionality, and case management to deliver the best end-to-end customer experience. We are taking this very seriously, and we will continue to invest GBP 20 million throughout 2023 and 2024 in order to drive margin expansion, optimize working capital, and enhance customer experience. Our success will be measured by consistently exceeding NPS of 50.
The previous slides were mostly about volumes. Let's now drill down into pricing, as Scott says. I firmly believe that pricing is like a muscle. If we use it only once a year. It won't lift much weight, and it will hurt the day after. I've had over 30 years experience in different industries and geographies, and I must say that Essentra has a fantastic culture and discipline when it comes to pricing. We have a proven track record because we did offset in 2022 fully the cost inflation, thanks to pricing action. As evidence, 83% of our recurring business has had a price increase over the last 12 months. Obviously, we still have room to go. I must also say that we are benefiting from the fact that, as Scott mentioned, we have a below-the-radar approach. However, our products are essential to the customer.
They only account for a small fraction of the total cost, therefore attract less attention and therefore yield a higher pricing inelasticity. As I mentioned, we have still room to improve in some geographies. 83% is not 100%, and that's what we are shooting for. Digitalization will provide multiple opportunities in the fields of visibility for our teams at products and customer level, global consistency of product approach, improvement in real-time user control, customer segmentation, and last but not least, use of AI pricing. In summary, we have the right pricing culture and discipline, and digital will take us to the next level. As I told you earlier, if there is one slide to remember, it is this one. We have a clear winning strategy for organic growth. It is based on three building blocks.
The first one is get more customers through an improved website and digital presence and winning with the winners. Our success will be measured by a growth of 5% in new customer acquisition. Our second building block is grow them by cross-selling. Here again, we are in a unique position because of our industry expertise and the breadth of our range. We will measure success by 5% growth in categories per customer. The last one, keeping them by being hassle-free. Digital enhancement will bring us new and better tools to provide a better customer experience. Again, here, success will be measured by exceeding NPS of 50. If we execute our strategy seamlessly and relentlessly, and we definitely will, we will organically grow our market share to 5%-6% of a total addressable market estimated between GBP 8 billion and GBP 10 billion. Thank you for your attention.
I hope I convinced you we have a winning strategy, which we will execute with passion and discipline. Now over to my colleague, Lynne, who will take you to a topic very close to our heart at Essentra.
Thank you, Hugues. Good morning, everyone. I'm Lynne Vandeveer. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer and President of Americas. It's such a pleasure to be with you here today. I'm going to talk with you about our source of competitive advantage from ESG. We've recently refreshed the ESG framework to more beautifully fit our pure-play components business, and that new framework has five pillars. I'll take you through each one of them with some examples. Before I do that, I have a video I'd like to show you which highlights some of our goals on ESG as well as our progress so far. I just love the energy of that video and the bright and sustainable future that it predicts for Essentra as a pure-play components business.
Our ESG and sustainability strategy is a really important part of our overall Essentra strategy and very engaging for our employees, for myself, and very inspiring for many others as well. When I first started talking, I told you we have five pillars. These are the five pillars that we've designed for Essentra's framework, and we've chosen these five particular pillars because we've done a materiality matrix analysis, and these five fit our pure-play components business beautifully. The five pillars are our planet, our culture, our communities, our components, and our customers. Following on from Hugues' great presentation on our customer, I'm gonna start with the customer pillar. As you heard from Scott and Hugues, we have a very broad and diverse customer base, small, medium, and large.
Many of our large customers do have well-defined sustainability goals, and we are well-positioned to help them to support them on their sustainability journey, help them meet their targets. We also have many small customers who are not as well developed or as advanced on their sustainability goals, but this is an opportunity for us. In many ways, we're ahead of our customers on this, but we're also well-positioned to partner with larger customers when they are ready. There's an example on this slide of an alliance that we've built with Iracroft. You might know Iracroft as a large tube manufacturer based in the UK. The photo on this slide shows Iracroft's tubes partnered together with LDPE caps like this one that Scott showed you. These are produced in our Kidlington UK facility.
Because of our alliance with Iracroft, 2.5 million of these LDPE caps do not go into landfill any longer. They are chipped, recycled, and returned into the manufacturing cycle. Another way that Essentra is delivering on our ESG strategy through the customer pillar is by focusing on ESG supportive industries. These have been mentioned several times already in our presentation today. Renewable energy and electric vehicles are two examples of that. The really inspiring, or I would say, exciting thing about our progress in this area is I can tell you that for electric vehicle charging stations, our sales are up 70% versus year ago. This is a very good start, and we have lots more opportunity in this area as well.
The second pillar is our planet, and this is the pillar that focuses on our goals for reducing carbon emissions. Essentra recently committed to the Science-Based Targets initiative, and we committed to refreshing our goals for midterm and long-term carbon re-reduction. Midterm, our goal is to reduce Scope 1 and Scope two emissions by 25% by 2025. Longer term, our goal is net zero by 2040. We've made really good progress against this goal. Since 2019, we've reduced absolute emissions by 11% and normalized emissions by 14%. Another key goal of this pillar is zero waste to landfill. While the video I just showed said 9 sites, we're actually up to 13 of our sites are on track to be zero waste to landfill by the end of 2022.
We aim to have all of our sites zero waste to landfill by 2030. The third pillar, components or our products themselves, and we're developing products using innovative technologies and sustainable materials. Essentra will be using 20% recycled content across all of our product range by 2025 through our commitment to the Circular Plastics Alliance. Our manufacturing site in Kidlington, in fact, is doing really good work in this area. Nearly all of our LDPE products produced in Kidlington contain 50% or more recycled content. In fact, some of those products are up to 98% recycled content. In 2021, we achieved 8.5% towards that 20% goal. You might be thinking, well, that 20% goal doesn't really seem like a very ambitious target because you're almost halfway there.
Actually, the next 11.5 points are gonna be more difficult because in order to achieve that 20% goal, we're going to have to make our nylon products more sustainable. Nylon is a more challenging material to work with technically. To face into that challenge in 2023, we're opening a sustainability center of excellence in our Kidlington facility. The number one priority for R&D in that facility will be focusing on making our nylon products more sustainable. The fourth pillar is our communities. The scale of Essentra means that we have not only an opportunity but a responsibility to ensure that there are good practices in the communities where we do business.
At Essentra, all employees are encouraged to volunteer time and good works in our own communities, and we offer paid time off for our hourly employees to make that possible for everyone in the company. There are some examples on this slide of some of the community programs that have recently happened across the company. On this photo, you can see members of our team in Flippin, Arkansas, packing food boxes for a food pantry. We're also very proud of our team in Poland who pulled together and put in a lot of time to collect supplies which were sent to Ukraine. Finally, we're working with suppliers to ensure ethical practices, and this is another area where we have an opportunity to digitalize the process through our supplier development program.
Last but not least is our culture, and this one is probably the one that just pulls it all together. This pillar contains the health and safety programs that of course you would expect us to have in all of our Essentra facilities. At Essentra, it's more than just keeping our employees physically safe while they're at work. It's also about well-being in a broader sense. Well-being means a lot of things to a lot of different people, like bringing your whole self to work. That belief at Essentra has led us to celebrate a lot of events on the D&I calendar. I feel very confident that as a pure play components business, the D&I agenda will continue to be an important part of our strategy and a priority for us as we build our culture.
One of the reasons that I feel so confident in that is that Scott Fawcett is the person who spearheaded and initiated the D&I agenda at Essentra plc when it was a three-part business. Now as a pure play components business, we have the opportunity to continue to embed that D&I priority into our culture. Employee engagement, as has been mentioned already, today several times, is a really important measure of the health of our business, and we're starting from a very good place. The last time we collected results from an employee engagement survey, we got very good participation. 90% or more of our employees actually participated in the survey. Of those who participated, 80% of them said they're very proud to work at Essentra.
As I said, we're starting from a very good place going forward as a pure play components business. Right now, our 2022 employment engagement survey is in the field, and we'll use the results of that employment engagement survey to shape and guide our D&I and culture agenda going forward. To wrap up, our five pillar strategy, our planet, our culture, communities, components, and our customers, is well suited to our pure play components business. I hope I've shown you how this five-part framework will help to be a powerful element in our strategy and a source of competitive advantage for Essentra. We look forward to sharing more of our progress with you when we talk about our full year results at the end of the year. Thank you very much for your time and your attention.
I hope that you enjoyed seeing this as much as I enjoyed presenting it. At this point, I'd like to turn it over to my colleague, Rob, to talk about our margin enhancement journey. Thank you.
Thank you, Lynne. Cheers. Good morning, everybody. My name is Rob Baker. I'm delighted to be leading the supply chain and operations teams at Essentra. It's a great team. Internally, we have a number of opportunities to go for. Externally, we operate in a challenging supply chain environment, as we see in the news every day. But actually for us, that affords some opportunities as well. This story of how we grow our margin to 18% is one about the internal and the external opportunities. If we tackle those two together, then we'll not only grow our margin, but we will have a more sustainable supply chain, and we will be more hassle-free for our customers.
I'm gonna start with talk about a little bit about the external environment and those opportunities. We have a really interesting change going on. Over the last three decades or so, we've seen these big shift changes in supply chain. We've seen globalization, we've seen digitalization. We're now seeing something quite different. It's generally called a polarization of supply chain. By this, we mean it's a conscious shift away from the sort of traditional global low cost manufacturing towards supply chains that are more local, reliable, and more controllable. With that, we're seeing also a greater sense of urgency in the sustainability agenda in supply chains. A much stronger push for that more quickly.
Now, what? This is all very interesting, but for us in Essentra, we have a great opportunity to capitalize on this change. As I'll show you in a minute, we have a very diverse manufacturing footprint. That enables us then to think about how we redeploy our tooling to move our make capabilities closer to the point of demand. In doing so, rebalance what we make where and what we make versus what we buy and bring more in-house. This delivers for us a number of opportunities. From a customer point of view, we're more responsive, we're more reliable. From a cash point of view, we have shorter lead times, lower inventory. From a cost point of view, we can really cherry-pick the opportunities in how we redeploy, to maximize margin at product level.
Sustainability, clearly, if we're shipping less globally, then we will have less Scope 3 emissions. You can see how this directionally plays towards margin expansion, ESG ambition, and hassle-free for our customers. Hold that thought because I will come back to this in a minute. If we just now have a look at our internal opportunities. Scott has already described this growth of the components business through acquisition over time. That inevitably leads to a degree of fragmentation and local processes and ways of working. Herein lies our opportunity. Our internal opportunity is in how we standardize, simplify, and integrate more tightly as a business. Now, we're implementing a new ERP system, so that is clearly an enabler. There is more to it than that.
We have a number of opportunities internally that we can capitalize on. By deploying some internal investment in a focused way on quick returns, we can really deliver some significant changes and improvements in how we optimize our footprint and how we buy better and how we operate efficiently. It's not just about the ERP platform, it's also about a number of other good opportunities that are available to us. We have laid a lot of the foundations for this as well. This becomes the key point here, is it becomes a journey of incremental improvements rather than big bang changes, and that gives us a lot more control. I'm just gonna quickly run through now just these, the footprint buying better and operating efficiently.
Just tell you a little bit more, give you a little bit more insight as to what is behind that. If we take our manufacturing footprint, I mentioned earlier we have this diverse footprint around the world. That is what it looks like. It's evolving, so we've already closed three sites as we start to consolidate. Coming back to this point around localization, what we're trying to do here is make sure that we have low-cost injection molding and dip molding capability in every region, and that we also have access hardware capability in every region. That's playing to this point around localization being closer to the point of demand.
Our journey through how we optimize our footprint is therefore about that optimization between the consolidation for low cost manufacturing and the need to be close to our customers. We'll have to balance that as we progress. In terms of capacity, we have enough capacity to absorb our organic growth. As M&A opportunities come along, we will therefore need to sort of reconsider and course-correct accordingly. These are manufacturing facilities, and indeed our suppliers supply our hubs and our warehouses, our 23 warehouses currently that Scott described earlier. Where we're moving to with our logistics footprint is in making sure that every region has two hubs.
The purpose of that is obviously to de-risk the supply chain and make sure that we have continuity of service, if any outage occurred, but also so we can deliver on our day one to day three stocked service promise. That's really important because our customers have told us that's what they want. We achieve that through this dual hub approach. Now within each of those hubs, we'll have optimized inventory. We achieve that optimized inventory through a number of initiatives, not least ERP will support us in the delivery of that. Actually through world-class demand planning and demand management. This will enable us to better forecast for this complex range that we have, 45,000 SKUs, what we need and where we need it, so it's ready for our customers when they want it.
That's critical part of how we will optimize the inventory. In terms of progress, we're doing well in Europe. We've got two new hubs in Europe. We've got our automated hub in Germany, which you saw in the video earlier. We've got a new hub in Poland. Our opportunity now in Europe is about consolidation. Now we've got that infrastructure in place. AMER is where we have least scope for growth into capacity growth. We will probably be investing a little in 2024 to support that growth in the AMER region. That's all within the CapEx plan that Jack will describe shortly. As far as APAC is concerned, we have a mixture of in-house and outsourced logistics, and we'll stick with that.
We'll review that as that region grows. Now, the other two elements are buying better and operating efficiently. This is where ERP really does help us because we will accelerate our improvements here through better systems, data, and processes. There is still a lot we can do while we implement ERP. For example, buying better at the heart of that is purely best practice procurement. Procurement operating model, getting the team geared up, category management strategies, consolidating our suppliers, consolidating our spend. We can do a lot of that now while we implement ERP. A lot of that work is underway. In terms of operating efficiently, it is about a good operation, good robust operational excellence strategy.
By that sounds a bit vague, so by that specifically, I mean, we take the processes and the systems that brought about by ERP, and then we overlay the whole people piece, and make sure that our people are motivated, capable, and executing those processes day in and day out for our customers. Beyond our people, it is about automation at our warehouses and manufacturing sites and robotic process automation in back offices to support transactional activity. A number of opportunities there. Now I'd just like to finish with a real example before I summarize in terms of a good example of what we mean by this. Currently, if we think about standardization and simplification, our warehouses today could receive an order from a customer for 75 pieces of something.
Now, what that might mean is that we then open up a bag of 1,000 pieces, and then we count out 75, and then we put them in a bag, and then we ship them to the customer. We have launched a program around mini packs, and basically what that means is, and conveniently here, we'll have a bag, a small bag of components, let's say it's 100, that we will default to for those small orders. You can imagine a world therefore where we're no longer picking 76 or 75 pieces. We're actually just picking once. You can see how that can really drive productivity improvement and reduce our cost to serve. Critically, the reason I called out that example is we don't need ERP to get started on that.
We can really start this journey through really picking those, you know, sort of big win initiatives and balancing against our interdependency with the ERP system. There's just an example. To summarize, this is the important thing to remember, polarization of the supply chain. We've got to capitalize on that. I've showed you how we'll do that. Helped by ERP, we will standardize, simplify, and integrate the business more tightly. Then through doing that, we will clearly benefit from economies of scale. Actually, the initiatives that we're building will drive enhancement, margin enhancements in buying better, optimizing our footprint, and operating efficiently. In doing so, we get to our 18%, and we have a more sustainable supply chain, and we're hassle-free for our customers.
Thank you for listening to that. We're gonna take a 15-minute break, and then after which, I'm gonna hand over to Jack after the break, who's gonna talk to us about our financial frameworks. Thank you.
Yes. Obviously, you've heard from Scott on the strategy and the, you know, the key differentiators that we have for the components going forward. Hugues clearly outlined a very strong commercial model whereby we should grow, and there's some very clear pinpointing underneath strategies and tenets to support that. Lynne has taken us through in detail the importance of sustainability to the company in the future. Rob has very well articulated the operational strategy and how we're gonna drive margin improvements. It falls to me to wrap up on the financial framework, what does that mean to the investors going forward? Paul, our chairman, has very clearly stated that this is all about driving shareholder value, and I hope to make the case here very succinctly that it is. Scott said that we will be doubling revenues and tripling profits.
Well, on the 5% organic growth and 5% acquisitive growth, we clearly demonstrate that we can double that revenue over the medium term being 5-6 years, and the profits will almost triple from 44- 120. Very importantly, the profit margin will go from 14%-18%, so we'll be improving the quality of the earnings over time. What are our targets associated with this? Well, we've got. We're going from a 14% operating margin to an 18% operating margin. Net debt to EBITDA, we're going to keep at less than one in the near term. We'll talk about the medium term shortly. Net working capital, Scott has mentioned that it's really important that we have stock available for customers.
We're also gonna drive the revenues on this business, so receivables increase, so it'll be 18% over the medium term. Other guidance, 4%-5% CapEx. Rob's talked a lot about investing in the business. Hugues has mentioned the digital profile. We will keep continuing investing in the business and growing that business. Cash conversion, again, we're gonna grow the business. It'll be 85% or better. ROIC, we're gonna measure all of our investments, whether it's acquisitive or organic, at 15%. Taxes now seem to have settled down with the recent government discussions at a 24%-26% range over the medium term. You can see that idea of doubling the revenue and tripling the profits, the underlying financial assumptions are very conservative. We can achieve this. It's an ambitious target, but it's deliverable.
How are we gonna allocate the capital in the new business? Organic growth, this is very much in strict order of preference. Organic growth is core. The capital investment will remain at 4%-5%. Year after year, we will keep investing in the business. In the downturns and in the upturns, we will invest. Innovation, Lynne's talked a lot about sustainability, the new product developments and propositions. These are really important to our customers and also to our employees and other stakeholders. Digitalization is key to the transformation of the business going forward, and we will invest our capital in that. Acquisitions, we're gonna come onto this in detail, but we have a strong pipeline, and the core of the strategy is around product adjacencies and getting the cross-sell across the business. We will be paying a dividend. It will be at three times cover.
It will be progressive in that as profits rise, the dividend will rise. On the acquisitions, Scott and others have said I will talk about this in some detail, and I will. You can see over the last 10 years, we have a really good, strong record of acquiring companies in different geographies with product adjacencies, very much building on our core range and successfully integrating and acquiring them. We have learned lessons as we've gone. Strategic clarity is essential. We have a highly disciplined approach. The importance of aligning the different management teams, getting the right people, making sure they're comfortable with us and we're comfortable with them is key. Communication across the piece is absolutely core to the process. It's essential. Keeping agile and recognizing that the plans will change. First shot in battle, things change. We've got to change.
We've got a strong track record of delivering, and we've learned our lessons, and we know how to do this, and we've got a good machine for integrating the businesses going forward. That gives us confidence in being able to deliver that acquisitive growth. Taking a couple of examples. We entered the Turkey market, we weren't there previously, with the acquisition of Mesan. It's an access hardware business. Scott and Hugues have mentioned how important that is to the growth of the company. It's a key area for us. It allowed us to sell into the Turkey market our existing products. It also allowed us to bring access hardware products to our European and Middle East customers across our network. That cross-selling, this is a really good example of the delivery of that.
Micro Plastics, different markets, North America, but it gave us good penetration into the customer base across North America. It enabled our service levels to go up and to improve our pricing. Again, we were able to cross-sell. You can see from the numbers that, you know, we really did increase the revenue in a very short space of time, and we tripled the profits. Again, that idea that we can triple the profit, double the revenues, we have case studies and reference points to show that that is entirely achievable. That's the past. What about the future? Well, we have a really good pipeline of projects. Hugues has mentioned this is a highly diversified and fragmented market. There are literally thousands of companies in our space across the world. That means that there's plenty of opportunities. We have hundreds in our hopper in the M&A.
We actively track 50 and maintain relationships at a local and at a company level. We have focus priorities of around about 25 companies, and at any given time, we'll have up to four active discussions. Currently, we have a very focused opportunity in the UK for a manufacturer distributor of components. Discussions are going very well, and we hope to be able to announce something on that in, as and when it's concluded in the near term. We also have an active conversation in America, where our team are visiting a company that will extend our product adjacencies this week. The message is, this is very much a real core thing we know how to do, and we do it well, and we're active currently. The idea of delivering our financial metrics is entirely achievable.
In summary then, we have a strong financial framework. Got very clear financial targets, but they're attainable, they're achievable. We have a clear capital allocation policy focused on organic growth, but we're acquisitive. We have a committed progressive dividend policy at three times cover, and we have a delivery of an M&A strategy that we know how to do and we will achieve. With that in mind, I'll hand it back to Scott to conclude.
Thanks, Jack. Just to bring it all together and to summarize, what we've told you today is explaining this is a unique business with a unique proposition. This combination of manufacturing and distribution across this broad range of these low-cost components is a unique business that we pull together. Operating in this highly fragmented market, which today we estimate at GBP 8-10 billion, that market will grow as we acquire more product adjacencies as well. Hugues and Lynne have talked about the organic growth story, the strategy for market share gain, enabled by digitalization and investment in sustainability, both of our operations and of the products that we're manufacturing.
Rob has then talked about the margin profile of the business and the opportunity we have to expand this further to our target of 18% through scale efficiencies, through operating efficiencies, including buying better, and also, as Hugues referred to earlier, in terms of pricing as well. Jack has talked about the strong returns, the high levels of cash conversion, which is enabling us to fund the M&A opportunity in this very, again, very fragmented market. Overall, we strongly believe the ambition to double the revenue and triple the profits of the business is well within our reach. With that, I'd like to open the floor up now to Q&A. We have some roving mics in the room. If we start in the room, and then we'll move online with any questions. Henry.
Thanks, yeah. Morning, guys. It's Henry Carver from Peel Hunt. I want to start with around the balance between distributing and manufacturing and I guess how that sort of directs your M&A thinking going forward and the strategy going forward generally. Is there a sort of perfect balance? Does it affect, you know, where you're searching for new deals or not? Or is it just all about products and products adjacencies?
Yeah. I'm not sure there's a perfect balance and we do see organizations of different shapes and different focuses being a good fit. Fundamentally though, we think we've created Essentra Components as a distribution business now. We have the logistics footprint in place. We have the sales office in place. We have the digital front end in place. It's most likely that we're going to acquire people who've got good product capabilities that we can plug into this distribution business that we've created that is Essentra Components. I also refer to Components now as an umbrella distribution business sitting on top of these product businesses that we've either owned or acquired over the years. Likely more manufacturing, but not a hundred percent rule that it must be a manufacturing business.
It's about product breadth probably as much as anything else. Occasionally geography, but product breadth probably as much as anything else.
Got it. Understood. Thanks. Just on the sort of resource you have for doing deals, how much of it was perhaps part of the central office before and now going on as just Essentra Components? Do you have the resource that you need to continue with the sort of momentum that you got on deals?
Yeah, we do. I mean, all of the profiling work, the hopper work, the relationship build is all held really within the old divisional team. So we have a guy called Richard Sederman who has worked for us for a number of years, who is really the custodian of that. He's one of the team visiting the U.S. this week for us. Most of those relationships we talked about with potential targets are owned by people on the ExCo, probably most of them with myself directly. So we're pretty self-sufficient. And again, we're going to be relatively conservative in the short term, one or two small bolt-on deals a year.
We'll be working with Jack's team in terms of the sort of transactional aspects of M&A, but the relationship work is really with the team that have been in place for some time.
Thanks.
Andy?
Thank you. Good morning, chaps. It's Andy from Jefferies. I've got so many questions, I'm not quite sure where to start. Okay, let's go here. Let's go with M&A. Can you talk to us about the margin profile of the companies that are on your list? On your slide, you kinda got 15% margins for your M&A. Clearly, you get there over time, but are we starting with 10% margins building up, or are we already at that 15% margin?
Certainly, if we just look at the two that are the most active at the moment, one has a slightly higher margin than the group, and one has a lower margin. Obviously, we tend to buy sort of 6-8 times earnings. After synergies and after putting in some of the efficiencies that we can, we tend to have an as-bought of 4-6. Part of the game is to push their margin up over time.
That leads me perfectly on to my second question. Will you only contemplate acquisitions that have synergistic opportunities, or would you buy businesses that don't? 'Cause by definition, that means you're gonna be a higher multiple if you haven't got the synergies.
We're only looking at highly synergistic businesses that we can plug into the business. Just adding to Jack's previous answer as well, most of the times we talked about we're buying manufacturing businesses, they tend not to be great at customer service, they tend not to be great at pricing. So by plugging them into our distribution channels, we're taking more direct business. We're definitely adding to their pricing capabilities, and that tends to be some of the drivers of the margin. Most businesses we acquire wouldn't be a hundred percent, most businesses will have a strong product cross-sell synergy opportunity, and that tends to be the driver of our attraction to them. Two reasons for that. One, we can drive synergy and we've got track record already, but also it adds to the customer value proposition of the whole thing.
We're adding to the value of the group. It's self-fulfilling in many ways, so.
Yeah. Historically, you've talked about a lot of white space in China, India, you know, kind of rest of the world, should we say. Is that still a key area of focus in terms of kinda balancing up that regional sales for the group?
I think over the midterm, it certainly is. Given the geopolitical tensions right now and some of the challenges in China, I would say less of a priority for the next 12 months, 18 months. We're going to be wanting to do things that are very much in our sweet spot for the immediate period, just while the world's feeling a little bit less certain. Strategically, still a very important area. You know, China is a quarter of the global industrial production, and we have a relatively low share. Increasingly focusing China for China is part of our go-forward strategy, but unlikely to make further acquisitions in China for the short term.
Okay. One more, and I'll let someone else have a go. If we think about the cross-selling opportunity, the way I think about you guys is you're kinda GDP plus, you know, X. If your sales teams can sell 5% more to each of your customers, that means you're kinda global GDP plus 1% price plus 5. We get to kinda 10% organic. Is that right in terms of my thinking? If not, what is the answer from the upside from cross-selling in reality? 'Cause it's not 5, it's 1, 2?
Yeah. I don't know if the math works at five. We're obviously doing some of it today.
Yeah.
Our plan is, and the key metric we're using is categories per customer, so increasing the number of categories that customers are buying by 5%. You know, that number is sub two today for the totality of the customer base. Pushing it over two gives you opportunity, but it wouldn't add 5%. You know, the 2, 3, 4% margin on cross-sell opportunities should be there for sure.
Yeah.
I wouldn't say at five.
All right. Okay. Thank you.
Adrian.
Morning. Adrian Kearsey, Panmure. Noticed on one of your charts that you have no access hardware manufacturing capability in North America. Is that something you'd want to address quickly within the mix in terms of production?
It would be very much up there in terms of a key strategic priority for us. It's the availability of targets that, you know, the targets that we would know in the US are privately held. Whether the owners are feeling now is the right time to be selling their businesses. You're right. If we had access hardware manufacturing in the US, it would give us further advantage to be able to sell that range into the US. Little bit too much detail. One thing we are going to do is look at doing some configuration of access hardware in the US.
Part of our strategy in the US logistics space is actually giving our ability to configure products in the US, which is a pathway step towards the local manufacturing capability, which we can take with our existing footprint. There are plans to improve, but undoubtedly an access hardware factory somewhere in the Americas would be a very great fit. If anybody finds one, then please, you know where my number is, so. James.
Hi. It's James Beard from Numis. I've got three. I'll just do them one by one if that's okay.
Perfect.
So firstly, on historic organic revenue growth of sort of 5% per annum, how does that split between pricing and volume growth typically? Then a sort of slight lead-on question to that is, if, as it appears, you know, sort of commodity price environment is a bit more deflationary now, how does that sort of impact your ability to pass pricing in 2023 versus where we've been in the last sort of 18 months?
We've been around 4.5% historic CAGR. I would say broadly 50-50 between pricing and volume over that 10-year period. We've always had a good ability to manage pricing. Clearly nothing like it's been the last 18 months. In terms of where we are now, we are still actively pushing pricing through to the market because we're still actively seeing cost price inflation. You're right, some of the raw material commodity prices are reducing and some of the freight costs are at least at a peak, if not starting to reduce as well. However, we're still seeing labor cost inflation. You know, the cost of living crisis is there, and we are planning certainly above average merit increases for next year, which we need to manage.
We have energy costs. While we're not overly exposed to energy costs and we're reasonably well covered, there are still energy cost inflation aspects that need to be managed. We're confident in our ability to continue to pass those through, even though we're seeing some prices deflate, other input prices are still inflating and customers are understanding of that.
Cool. Thank you. Secondly, on the customer side of things, you know, obviously, growing your customer base appears to be, you know, a core part of the organic growth strategy. Over the last sort of 5 years or so, the customer base has contracted from just over 100,000 to sort of about 75,000, I think it was, in the most recent fiscal year. Can you just explain sort of that process? How's that process? Is that sort of bottomed out now, and are you in a position where, I guess, your core customer base is actually growing?
Yeah. We talked about those three customer groups on that pie chart, the industrial manufacturing customers, the consumer manufacturing customers, and then small, medium enterprises. We've deliberately been trying to be less attractive to small or medium enterprises, and it's not easy given search marketing is one of our biggest marketing channels, and it's fairly indiscriminate. Tuning that has been important. You can see that I think still 25% of our customers are in that smaller than ideal category. We need to manage those effectively, try and manage more of their interactions digitally, clearly. We will continue to try and make that number a small percentage of the overall. Our focus, as Hugues talked about, is in those industrial categories, and we are seeing some good growth, especially in those higher growth areas as well.
I think when we come to year-end, we'll try and identify the growth by customer, by segment, and just make that a little bit clearer, 'cause you're right, the overall number looks like it's been declining, but it has been by design.
Cool. Finally, just on the sort of building blocks of the operating margin improvement that you're sort of targeting over the next five or six years, again, what sort of 400 basis point margin uplift. How much of that is just operational gearing from volume versus some of the more specific initiatives that were talked to during the presentation?
Yeah. I'd say at least half of it is purely through that, through the gearing. Obviously, our fixed cost base is gonna remain the same, the SG&A. As we acquire extra revenue, gross margin will flow through to an increased operational margin. That's the bulk of it. Some of the initiatives that we talked about with both Hugues and Rob in terms of operational improvements and being smarter and more efficient and some of the stuff that Lynne talked about in terms of cost mitigation. The sustainability also reduces costs. I think that'll be the other element. Probably two-thirds, one-third.
Obviously, we've just inherited or built an additional cost base with the move of the central costs to enable us to be a standalone business. We have a new aspect of fixed costs that we'll be able to cover and gear against as we grow the business, so both organically and inorganically.
Okay.
Daniel.
Thank you very much. Scott, first of all, congratulations on your new CEO position. You're surely gonna enjoy talking to us in the coming years. Two questions for you, one by one again. In terms of our acquisitions, as you said, you know, there are lots of opportunities. Are we possibly considering going to higher value, higher margin products?
We're not excluding higher margin products, and certainly some of the businesses we look at have a higher margin profile and a higher operating margin total profile. I would say most of the business we're looking at, though, have a lower profile than we have at the starting point, predominantly because of the size and scale of those businesses and the fact that they're typically serving through more distribution than direct. I wouldn't rule it out. There are some interesting product adjacencies that I think could give us some good margin profile. Connectors is probably the good example here. We think industrial connectors is a great opportunity. We've looked at a couple of assets over the last year or so.
They haven't been quite right, so we've not pursued them. That they could well come with a higher than average margin mix. I guess the margin mix isn't the starting point of what we're looking for. It is that synergy and ability to cross-sell. I think there's some areas out there which may prove to be higher margins.
Okay, cool. Thank you. If you were not at Essentra, and you were looking at Essentra from a distance, would you form the view that, we are trying to do too many things to too many people?
No, I don't think I would. I'd say we are clear and unique in what we're trying to do. We're trying to aggregate this low-cost bill of materials category in a way that nobody else is doing that. The fact that we are able to aggregate means we attract a very wide base of industrial customers. You need to do that if you're going to build some sort of aggregation distribution business. You need that scale. I think we're clear in the purpose of the business and the strategy of the business and then taking that to market gives us the breadth. No, I think we're pretty clear.
Thanks a lot. One quick one for Jack, please. I mean, I'm referring to your GBP 200 million target. I mean, after all this of debt and cash and net, what's our current position?
We are slightly cash positive.
Yeah. How much do you think this GBP 200 million acquisition will cost roughly?
The GBP 200 million, that's well, we're gonna do, over the next 3-4 years, we're gonna do GBP 30-60 million of acquisitions per annum.
Yeah.
Probably in years 4-6, we'll be doing more like GBP 50-80 million type acquisitions.
They're kind of small acquisitions funded by organic.
All bolt, all bolt-ons. We've got a very strong cash flow of GBP 70 million+ per year, plus we've got this very good conservative balance sheet to start with, so we should be able to fund it, eminently sensibly.
Thank you very much. I should shut up.
Thank you.
Please.
Good morning. One question from me, Andres Castanos from Berenberg. About your digital capabilities, the new front end, when did you launch it? Since then, how much has the acquisition and the sales through digital channels moved up? Can you describe
The launch has been over the last three years, I think, in total. The last site actually went live earlier this year in Thailand. We have just about, not all, but just about all of the Essentra Components sales centers with a local language, local currency website. I think Hugues referred to the point that since launching those sites, we've seen a doubling of both the organic traffic to the site. We're having to pay less for traffic because we're tuning the websites better predominantly to Google. Although Google keep changing the rules, which is why we need to keep updating the websites. We've seen a doubling of the conversion rate. Now that conversion rate is split. It's getting a little bit technical.
It's split between order conversion and lead conversion. Both have gone up, I think fairly equally. The percentage of online sales has gone up, but it's gone up from 3%- 5% or something. It's still very low, but the number of leads that we generate each day, week, and month via the website has also doubled. We're generating, I think it's around 1,000 leads a week of opportunities that are coming in from the website which are again hitting the sales centers.
Now, one of our problems is that's a lot of new opportunities, and Hugues talked to this AI lead scoring, which is how we're gonna use technology to try and prioritize that long list of opportunities that are coming into our call centers to understand which sales channels to use for which opportunity. You know, if there's a clear larger manufacturer in the solar industry where we've just had a lot of success, the AI will be promoting that to the top, so we send our solar category person to go and talk to that customer. Where if it's a smaller local manufacturer, we'll probably push them into an automated marketing channel. A lot of leads getting generated, and now it's about how do we prioritize that lead effort through the use of technology.
We'll come this way first, shall we come?
Morning. Sanjay, BLP . On cross-selling, I can see how big the opportunity can be and that digital in particular can help a lot. Historically, what do you think the biggest barriers to more cross-selling have been? Has it been how the sales team have been incentivized? There's been a change in that?
It's knowledge of the sales team. I would argue. It's an area that we're acutely aware of and working on. I think Hugues again talked about the knowledge management, learning management systems that we've created to try and help improve that knowledge. We also have another program which we're launching called essentially digitalizing expertise. How do we have the expertise of each of these products most readily available to all of our sales channels? I would say our salesperson knowledge, the ability to be confident in inquiring about opportunities across the breadth of the products offer is probably the key barrier. We can use technology to accelerate knowledge in people as well. That's very much what we're working on right now.
Okay. As well as the knowledge, is there a change in how they're incentivized?
We very much focus on new business from an incentives point of view, and new business is a combination of new customers and cross-sell. They have both of those aspects in their focus. I think there's always an opportunity for us to improve how incentivized programs work, and we've got a call tomorrow to start working some of this for next year. That new business focus I think is broadly right. Whether we tune further into cross-sell may be an option for us, but new business pretty much captures it. There's one more at the back, Andy, if you can come back to here.
Yeah. Thanks very much. It's Karl Green from RBC. Just one question from me. Just a question around the interplay between your net working capital intensity and your self-manufacturing status. If for whatever reason you decided that you wanted to accelerate, and I think you've alluded to the fact you would push that, what would the dynamic look like in terms of the capital intensity, in terms of having greater resilience within the model? I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer here, but would you be confident you can still keep it to 18% if you push that on further?
Yeah. I mean, broadly, the products we manufacture, we have greater control over the working capital impact. I mean, it makes Rob's and his team's life very difficult, but we choose to run our manufacturing sites fairly inefficiently because we drive them to a stock position and a working capital commitment. We're driving pressure into the operational sites to keep working capital under control. I would suggest we probably have a lower minimum order value for a self-manufactured item than we would for buying that item from the marketplace. Overall, there should be a working capital gain to manufacturing more than sourcing.
Yeah. I agree with that.
Sorry, Andy. Back to o kay.
Hi. Andy from Jefferies again. You talked a number of times about the uniqueness of the Essentra Components business. Why is that? Why has no one else kind of tried to copy you? Or is there a reason?
I don't know. It's either brilliance or crazy. I'm betting on brilliant quite clearly. It would be a brave move for their typically privately held businesses manufacturing one of these product lines to suddenly jump into the next product area. You know, this journey started even before me, and I guess I was brought in to accelerate that route to distribution, if you like. Yeah, we've not seen anybody else try and break out of their historic product category. I think without doing that, you then don't really have the scale to enable that stock investment and the marketing and sales investment you need to be a good distribution type business.
I guess I'm probably not the right person to ask given that we are the ones doing it. I do sit back and think this is amazing, and you know, if I had my time again, would I have done this somewhere else 15 years ago? It's a fantastic business model I think we've effectively created.
Following on to that from a customer perspective, is there a short-term, long-term trend, I don't know, about kind of using Essentra as a one-stop shop as opposed to using Mar and Par for bits and pieces? Or is it going the other way to reduce the kind of how strong you are as a market player?
No, I think this is the only danger of the strategy is that we become above the radar at some point, but we're not there yet. I think everything's saying our customers will continue to want to consolidate suppliers. We know there's cost in dealing with suppliers and managing suppliers. I think on top of that, the opportunity around sustainability and being able to provide that information about the sustainability Scope 3 emissions of the products we're managing and a commitment to reduce those emissions. I think that need or that value in being the one-stop shop is only gonna increase in all honesty.
Okay. Thank you.
Rob Plant from Panmure. You've talked about exciting new areas like EV. Are there legacy industries where you just don't think it's perhaps worth investing in or just pulling out from?
Yeah. I would say managing for cash possibly is the way to articulate them. Interestingly, when you look at the legacy of our business, we probably had 25 cents of the business tied up in automotive historically, and we've moved away from that over the last 20 years. We see obviously the industrial, the sort of internal combustion engine opportunities are going to reduce over the coming decade and probably stop at the end of that period. We have some products which are not solely for that market, but which are sold into that market, and we'll be managing those to cash and to exit.
I think what's really interesting here, though, is we've done some work to look at the value of components we can sell to a car with an industrial combustion engine versus the value of components we can sell to a car, which is either hybrid or electric, and there's like a 30%-40% uplift in the new world. We've now just gotta go out and win that. So the opportunity again is there to be had. But that's probably one of the areas that we're clearly seeing that transition, and it's very well published, and we just wanna make sure that we're moving with that market, and Hugues Delcourt talked about a little bit of that from an EV point of view.
We'll generally wrap up by 12:00 P.M.
I think you guys are staying on for another half an hour or so.
Yeah, we'll be around.
Scott and his whole team. If you wanna have a one-to-one or three-to-one or whatever it is, then these guys will be happy. Yeah. Thanks very much for all attending. I hope you found that enlightening. I think, you know, we think it's a great strategy going forward, and I think we've got the team to deliver it. Thank you very much. Thanks, all.
Thank you.
Thank you.